The pushback from the right started almost immediately, and with all the acid vitriol by which they inflamed the violent passions that almost certainly led to the shooting in Arizona last Saturday in the first place. You could watch the bogus Jared Lee Loughner Facebook pages…the ones where he admits his loathsome liberal tendancies…being created and deleted as fast as the Facebook administrators could catch them going up. You can really tell they learned their lesson from the killing of Matthew Shepard. If now was then, they’d have been calling Shepard a meth using sex addict and McKinney and Henderson a couple of drugged out psychopaths and the killing a Tragic robbery gone bad long before the body had a chance to get cold, let alone buried. And as always, a key ingredient in the smokescreen building are the uncertainties, inevitable so close to the event itself, if not for far, far beyond it. What actually did motivate the killer? Was he a leftist or a hard core Tea Partier? Did he read Marx or Hitler? Did he surf The New Republic or Daily KOS? And if we can’t answer those basic questions then dare you lay blame for this horrible, horrible tragedy at the feet of Sarah Palin and the Tea Party you treasonous America hating liberals.
And so on…and so forth…
What does it mean to “lay the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords at the feet of Palin and the Right”? That they gave the killer the gun and some money and sent him on his way? That they deliberately incited this specific killer to this specific act? That they fueled a dangerous climate of violence against their political opponents, deliberately, to intimidate their political opposition without particularly caring if any one of them actually got killed, because long ago they stopped seeing the opposition as their neighbors, their fellow Americans, but rather as an enemy to be defeated by any means necessary, and if one of them Did get killed it would teach the rest a lesson?
“Commonsense Conservatives & lovers of America: ‘Don’t Retreat, Instead – RELOAD!'” -Sarah Palin via Twitter
Angle: I feel that the Second Amendment is the right to keep and bear arms for our citizenry. This not for someone who’s in the military. This not for law enforcement. This is for us. And in fact when you read that Constitution and the founding fathers, they intended this to stop tyranny. This is for us when our government becomes tyrannical…
Manders: If we needed it at any time in history, it might be right now.
Angle: Well it’s to defend ourselves. And you know, I’m hoping that we’re not getting to Second Amendment remedies. I hope the vote will be the cure for the Harry Reid problems.
Responsibility. If our fingerprints are not actually on the murder weapon itself then we are not responsible. It is immoral for you to use this National Tragedy for partisan political advantage. And if our violent eliminationist rhetoric did happen to motivate that poor psycho to pack a gun and kill an elected officeholder we’ve placed our crosshairs on, well then logically liberals are the ones who are responsible. Because if it wasn’t for all that ACLU liberal freedom of speech stuff he would never have heard us talking about 2nd amendment remedies for adverse election outcomes. Responsibility.
No human eye can isolate the unhappy coincidence of line and place which suggests evil in the face of a house, and yet somehow a maniac juxtaposition, a badly turned angle, some chance meeting of roof and sky, turned Hill House into a place of despair, more frightening because the face of Hill House seemed awake, with a watchfulness from the blank windows
This house, which seemed somehow to have formed itself, flying together into its own powerful pattern under the hands of its builders, fitting itself into its own construction of lines and angles, reared its great head back against the sky without concession to humanity. It was a house without kindness, never meant to be lived in, not a fit place for people or for love or for hope. Exorcism cannot alter the countenance of a house; Hill House would stay as it was until it was destroyed.
–Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House
I am not a superstitious person, but this abandoned office building has been creeping me out now since I first laid eyes on it last year on one of my trips down here to Disney World. It’s located right next to the Holiday Inn I’m staying at. A sign in front of it suggests that it was due to be converted into a resort/spa opening sometime in the spring of 2009. I’m guessing the money ran out and it’s just been sitting here ever since.
Ever notice those lost little spots in the commercial strips..the ones that never seem to make a go of it and repeatedly close, open again under new management, only to close again and repeat the cycle over and over until they’re finally torn down. Often the new place doesn’t do much better. It’s as though some earthly places are just bad spots to build on.
This was one of the intriguing concepts in Shirley Jackson’s haunted house story that really captured my imagination so many years ago. See…Hill House wasn’t a disturbed place because there were ghosts walking in it. The ghosts were there because the house was disturbed. The house was, as Jackson wrote, insane. Old Hugh Crain didn’t create an evil house, so much as unwittingly cause an evil house to be built. Perhaps I wondered, it had just been built on a very wrong spot. Maybe old Hugh, because he was such a wicked man, had been unwittingly drawn to it. But as Jackson wrote, the house had formed itself.
I am not a superstitious person, and yet like all of us I sometimes wonder. I see a house that, as Jackson wrote, is never off guard, always seeming to be watching, and it creeps me out. I let my imagination give it an appropriately despairing past, and fill its spaces with lonely ghosts to walk inside. I am human…I read a quote somewhere to the effect that ghosts were born the day the first human opened their eyes. It had never occurred to me before now, that a modern spandrel glass and concrete aggregate office building could give birth to a good ghost story. But there is one here to be written by someone.
It was a quiet out of the way spot on a road just starting to attract the attention of developers and big money financiers. Hotels were rising, strip shopping centers, discount stores, office parks. Somehow it had remained untouched in the rush to cash in. Eventually a particularly slimy developer laid his eyes on the spot and saw a quick fortune to be made. Financing was hastily arranged via his reliable network of equally slimy bankers. A magnificent office building was planned and pre-sold to an equally slimy corporation, whose board of directors were even more degenerate then the bankers and developer. It was dedicated in a glittering grand opening ceremony costing hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Within weeks of settling into their new office space, the CEO announced a sudden change of plans and moved his company out in a hurry. Suits and counter suits ensued. The building was put up for sale. Nobody who leased it ever occupied it for more then a few days. Turnover in the security guards hired to keep vandalism in check was high. Reports that vandals broke in at night, stealing some things and wreaking others, could never be verified because nothing ever seemed to be missing the next day. When questioned, former tenants all swore they had never, and would never enter the building at night to take things…or for any other reason.
Somebody needs to write this. I know a good place to go for inspiration.
The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the National Center for Transgender Equality conducted the largest survey of transgender discrimination. Among its findings were one quarter of transgender people lost a job for being transgender and high rates of housing instability and homelessness. The survey also revealed double the rates of poverty for transgender people compared to the general population. The data indicate that transgender people have higher vulnerability to violence. It also found that more than half of transgender and gender non-conforming people who were bullied, harassed or assaulted in school because of their gender identity have attempted suicide.
Gender non-conforming people… A lot of people fall into that category who might mistakenly assume that violence toward transgendered persons isn’t any of their concern. But the gay man casually holding the hand of the man he loves, the uppity straight woman, the insufficiently masculine and aggressive boy, all are regarded as fair prey by thugs, and for exactly the same reason.
“I suggest, indeed, letting children who wish go to school in clothes of the opposite sex – but not counseling other children to not tease them or hurt their feelings. On the contrary, don’t interfere, and let the other children ridicule the child who has lost that clear boundary between play-acting at home and the reality needs of the outside world. Maybe, in this way, the child will re-establish that necessary boundary. It is a mistake for various interfering, ignorant, and biased busybodies to try to “counsel” the other children into accepting the abnormal. It is very healthy to be able to draw the line between what is healthy and what is sick.”
-Joseph Berger, NARTH Scientific Advisory Committee
Many people who read that when it first hit the blogstream were appalled. What kind of man actually advocates bullying a child? But it is a vanishingly short distance between aggression toward adults perceived as weak, and children who are by nature vulnerable. The mindset of the adult who would excuse the one, is unlikely to shrink from the other, or even understand that it is wrong.
There are two parts to the gay rights struggle. There is the freedom to love and be loved in return. There is the freedom from the closet, to live our lives openly, honestly, as the persons we actually are. No decent society denies these to its own. Our struggle then, and those of our transgendered neighbors, are one and the same. Against gender conformity. Against hatred of difference. But understand also, that the struggle of transgendered people in the broader sense reminds us that the American dream of liberty and justice for all is still very much an unfinished business.
Amid criticism over intensified airport screening measures, Secretary Janet Napolitano defended the Department of Homeland Security’s use of full-body scanners and pat-downs as essential to “match the changing threat environment that we inhabit.”
“This is all being done as a process to make sure that the traveling public is safe,” she said, adding that officials would “have an open ear” if adjustments to the new rules needed to be made.
Got an open ear do you?
Good thing I actually like long distance road trips. But hopefully in my lifetime the great ocean liners can start making a comeback. Please. I would still like to see the world someday.
What’s in a name? A 12-year-old girl at Hernando Middle School in Mississippi was beaten by five fellow students — reportedly because they said her name, Randi, was “a boy name.””They started talking about me like I was a man,” she told local news station WREG. “That I shouldn’t be in this world. And my name was a boy name.” The four girls and a boy surrounded her after a Fellowship of Christian Students meeting, and, she said, kicked her in the rib and leg, hit her in the face, sat on her, pushed her face into the floor, and threw her onto a cafeteria table.
It was caught on tape apparently. However, officials at Hernando Middle School have tastefully agreed to keep the incident hidden from public view, and keep the police out of it.
A school administrator issued a statement, said WREG, that “fighting is not tolerated and that disciplinary action will be taken to the fullest extent of the law.” No charges were filed, however, because the police were not called. Whether the attack was an isolated incident or part of ongoing bullying remains unknown.
As Savage says, this isn’t simply a disciplinary matter, this was a violent attack on a twelve year old girl whose only crime was having the name Randi. By not calling the police, school administrators are abetting a criminal act. I suppose that because they were part of a Fellowship of Christian Students the school administration felt they must have had noble motives. Perhaps they were just trying to save her soul from eternal damnation for having the name her parents gave her.
The girl in question is said not to be gay herself, and that would be beside the point except for the fact that some parents seem to think that only gay kids are at risk for anti-gay bullying. But bullying is a sickness that pervades an entire school, terrorizing anyone who might even be thought to be fair game, and the message from Perkins and others of his kind is that those who are different, merely by their existence, threaten civilization itself. Out of one side of their mouths they say Love The Sinner. Out of the other its Hate The Sin.
Oh, and that were we to simply let them live their lives in peace marriage will be destroyed, the terrorists will win and civilization itself will crumble and fall.
Here’s how that plays out in the lives of children: Four girls and a boy surrounded a twelve year old girl after a Fellowship of Christian Students meeting, kicked her in the rib, kicked her leg, hit her in the face, sat on her, pushed her face into the floor, and then threw her onto a cafeteria table. Perhaps they then went home and read their bibles. See how much we love you Jesus…look what we did to Randi…
Cameron’s theory that Germany didn’t loose World War I it was stabbed in the back by Jews and traitors at home the Proposition 8 defense lost because they didn’t use the good stuff, is one you had to see coming the moment the trial ended. The anti-gay industrial complex lives in its own world, its own mutually self referencing echo chamber, where all their comfortable conceits regarding heterosexual superiority are never allowed to collide with the slightest bit of cold hard reality. The instant they had to come out of that world and explain themselves in a court of law all their cherished fairytales went up in smoke.
Here’s a cartoon I did at the time…
It was a moment gay Americans had been waiting decades for. The sight alone, of so many straight media pundits scratching their heads at how utterly empty the anti-gay position actually is when you look at it closely was intensely satisfying. Oh…did you think they were arguing in good faith…? But if you even tarried momentarily with the thought that this might cause the kook pews to reconsider things a bit, ask themselves an uncomfortable question or two about what they know and how they know it, perhaps even feel a twinge of shame over what they’ve been doing all these years to innocent people, you do not know the breed.
No, they fled right back into the echo chamber at speeds that would have made Einstein’s jaw drop, and started bellyaching that the rest of the world Can’t Handle The Truth…
To be sure, homosexual activists have been building a ‘scientific case’ that homosexuality is irrelevant to marriage or successful child rearing — and also unrelated to child molestation, etc. — by publishing quasi-bogus conclusions appended to empirical studies in the journals of the major psychiatric professions, or by getting these associations to make exculpatory pronouncements. Consistent with Judge Walker’s legal argument, most of these studies purport to ‘prove’ that the outcomes and consequences of homosexuality are no different than the outcomes and consequences of heterosexuality.
Since a trove of such studies exist, then if what ‘science’ is is what gets published in peer-reviewed professional journals or declared by professional associations, the homosexuals ‘win.’ After all, homosexual sympathizers have generated more pro-gay conclusions based on social science studies than conclusions in studies that refute their ‘proof.’
And Guess Who Happens To Possess such a treasure trove of studies that refute their ‘proof’. Go on…guess…
We at Family Research Institute (FRI), of course, have ‘skin in this game.’ As researchers, we have published more extensively on homosexuality in peer-reviewed scientific journals than any one else on ‘our side.’
Peer-reviewed scientific journals like Psychological Reports which is to peer review as due diligence was to banks during the mortgage bubble. Or as Jim Burroway put it…
Of the thirty-four articles he’s published since 1986, all but five have appeared in the relatively obscure Psychological Reports. The others appeared in the journals Omega, Adolescence, Journal of Psychology, and the Journal of Biosocial Science. All of these journals rank very poorly among social science journals according to Journal Citation Reports, which measures the importance of a journal according to how often articles in that journal are mentioned in other journals — and thus its “impact” among social scientists. All of these journals rank in the lower half among social science journals. Most of them, including Psychological Reports, rank near the bottom.Psychological Reports claims to be a peer-reviewed journal, although editor Doug Ammons adds that “no reviewer has a veto right.” This is in sharp contrast to other, more respected peer-reviewed journals which will refuse to publish an article if serious objections are raised during the peer-review process.
Psychological Reports also differs from the other more respectable journals in another very important way: it charges its authors a fee $27.50 per page to publish. That’s why most professionals dismiss Psychological Reports as a “vanity journal,” one that will publish just about anything as long as the author is willing to pay the fee.
Let’s hear it for peer review. I mean…what’s more peer then a wad of cold hard cash?
So Cameron’s complaint is that Proposition 8 lost at trial because the defense was too afraid to put him on the witness stand, where he would have stood up for Real Science not fake Social Studies Science and swept everyone off their feet with such scientific brilliance even teh gay would have had to admit He Speaks Truth About Homosexual. I for one, truly regret this. I will go to my grave sorry Paul didn’t get his day in court. Really. Honestly. It would have been so absolutely Wonderful to watch Olson and/or Boies cross examine him. A pair of lions ripping apart a hapless gazelle while Maggie Gallagher watches with a look on her face like she’s about to vomit.
In my dreams I can just picture it happening…starting with “Mr. Cameron, do you recall speaking to a group in Lincoln Nebraska during the time that city was considering adding sexual orientation to their human rights ordinance? Do you recall telling them that a 4 year old boy had his genitals almost severed during a homosexual act in the restroom of the Gateway Mall…?”
“In a court of law you’ve got to come in and you’ve got to support those opinions, you’ve got to stand up under oath and cross-examination. And what we saw at trial is that it’s very easy…to make all sorts of statements and campaign literature, or in debates where they can’t be cross-examined. But when they come into court and they have to support those opinions and they have to defend those opinions under oath and cross-examination, those opinions just melt away. And that’s what happened here. There simply wasn’t any evidence, there weren’t any of those studies. There weren’t any empirical studies. That’s just made up. That’s junk science. It’s easy to say that on television. But a witness stand is a lonely place to lie…” -David Boies
Rand Paul, white heterosexual tea party candidate won his contest last night, and among cheering white heterosexual supporters announced to the world…
I have a message – a message from the people of Kentucky, a message that is loud and clear and does not mince words: We’ve come to take our government back!
Our government. Our government. Our government. This from the man who said it was wrong for government to force businesses to obey civil rights laws because it was a violation of individual liberty, but who also thinks government should be in the business of controlling women’s bodies, dictating what is and what is not marriage and what is and what is not a family. So when speaks of “the people” and utters the phrase “our government” it’s pretty easy to tell that “the people” are not necessarily his neighbors in this life but merely his own kind. White. Heterosexual. Oh…and rich. Very very rich.
Thus, the Louisiana Courier Press reported during the campaign…
Along with college and university students, Paul is courting the libertarian-leaning Republicans who got excited about his father. But to win a Kentucky primary, he’ll need social conservatives, and University of Kentucky political scientist Stephen Voss said he must be careful as he tries to appeal to both.
“This is a difficult tightrope to walk,” said Voss, who nonetheless believes Paul may be the front-runner right now. “When he’s talking economics and money, he is philosophically a libertarian. When he talks about social issues, he’s sending guarantees to the right wing that he’s not libertarian.”
Paul says he opposes abortion without exception, not even in cases of rape, incest or the health of the expectant mother. He also opposes marriages between gay and lesbian couples. At the same time, he voices staunch opposition to government intruding in the private lives of citizens.
A Difficult Tightrope To Walk… No, not a tightrope, a deception. There are two kinds of “libertarian”. There’s the useful tools who really believe that crap. I was one of those back in the late 70s and moved around in Libertarian circles, working on campaigns, getting bored shoppers to sign our petitions, and that was where I saw that I was basically just a useful tool for the other sort of Libertarian. The faux ones. The rich right wingers and hard core John Birchers who saw libertarian rhetoric as a good way to bamboozle voters, especially young voters. I first saw it when a vigorous argument broke out in the ranks after the U.S. supreme court decision in Hardwick v. Bowers upheld the state’s sodomy laws. I was aghast and fully expected my comrades in the movement to be also. But…no. It was all about “state’s rights” many of them said. But, but…says I…surely the states don’t have the right to toss grown adults in jail for simply for having sex either, no matter how strongly others may disapprove. Individual liberty and all that. No, no, I was told over and over. “State’s rights”. “State’s rights”. “State’s rights”.
It was a slogan I had come to know well from the fight over race segregation in America, and I knew perfectly well even at a young age just what it was code for, along with that other famous code phrase of the time. We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.
The free association in dreams can be a really fascinating thing to examine when you get a hook on it. This morning I woke up from a dream where I was trying with no success to photograph a gay pride parade. In the typical way of dreams that want to frustrate you, the digital SLR I was carrying absolutely refused to take the shots I was trying to take. But what stuck in my mind after I woke up, was the enchanting use of two commonplace words.
I was standing at one end of the main street of some small city: a mashup as these dream locals usually are of several city neighborhoods I’ve lived in over the course of my life. The parade was coming toward me in the distance and I was facing down a street with a grade that casually dipped down and then rose back up again in the distance to a point slightly higher then where I was standing. Both sides of the street were packed with old brick buildings, like oversized row houses. Most were shops with large glass display windows. Narrow sidewalks lined both sides of the street, which was empty of cars for the parade. People lined the street, watching the parade in the distance as it came toward us.
I had a good digital SLR around my neck and a camera bag with various items hanging from one shoulder. As I tried to snap off a few shots of the people watching, and also of the parade in the distance, the camera kept failing to take the shot. Interestingly, the camera gave me tactile feedback that the shot had failed, by way of the shutter release. Instead of a short sharp throw and clean release, the button became heavy and mushy and then would not move. As soon as I felt it I knew something had gone wrong. I glanced at the digital display on the back of the camera, only to see a shot I’d taken some weeks before, still on the memory card.
Ah…thinks I…the memory card is full. I tried erasing what was on it, not caring at that point if I’d saved the images off somewhere because I had a job to do, which was cover the pride parade. But the card would not erase. It was that kind of dream. I tried reformatting it and that didn’t work. So I ejected that one and rummaged around in my camera bag for another. But all I could find were old, low capacity cards. I knew I couldn’t get many shots on those, but now I was getting desperate, the parade was coming closer, so I popped one in. When I tried to take a shot with it, the camera ejected it.
I was on a main street, full of little shops. I wondered if one of those sold memory cards. Here’s where it got interesting. I walked over to one of the bystanders and asked them if there was a place nearby that sold glass. “Glass” in this dream world, apparently being the word people used for memory cards. The guy I asked knew right away what I meant, and pointed me to a shop just a couple doors down. I thanked my good fortune and ran over to it and ducked inside.
Inside was like an old candy store, except instead of chocolate bars there were dozens and dozens of different kinds of memory cards, all laid out in rows of trays. There was no packaging, just the cards, by type and brand. Most were of types I’d never seen before. It was almost like looking a trays of loose nuts and bolts except the cards were all laid out neatly in rows. As I looked over a particular row of cards, the proprietor of the shop, a friendly looking older guy who was standing behind the counter, told me that the glass in that particular section were all product fancy. It was a term I immediately understood to mean second hand.
It’s interesting how the mind works. “Product fancy” in that dream world, was when someone buys something and they take it home and it turns out it wasn’t the right size or something after all, so they bring it back and exchange it for something else that is right. So it was merchandise returned almost immediately either without having been used or only used once. A higher grade of second hand merchandise in other words. “Like new”. The term “product fancy” probably came from some dream state free conflation in my mind of two senses of the word “fancy”: something you desire, and something illusory. I thought that was the right size but it wasn’t…
The use of “glass” for “memory card” probably came from that dream state free association of memory chips and silicon, which is what chips are made from, and silica which is the oxide of silicon glass is made from.
The dream ended as I was looking through the trays for a memory card so I don’t know if I ever found one and got the parade shots I wanted, but when it ended I was confidant they were there, that shop seemed to sell nothing but memory cards and they had hundreds of different types all laid out like candy bars in a candy store, so I probably did eventually get my shots. That was a kinda neat world though. Some mornings I wake up wishing I lived in the world I was just dreaming about.
But We Must Consider The Feelings Of The Bullies Too…
The problem with directly confronting and dealing with anti-gay bullying is apparently we have to do it in a way that doesn’t make the bullies feel like they’re doing anything wrong…
A spate of teen suicides linked to anti-gay harassment is prompting school officials nationwide to rethink their efforts against bullying – and in the process, risk entanglement in a bitter ideological debate.The conflict: Gay-rights supporters insist that any effective anti-bullying program must include specific components addressing harassment of gay youth. But religious conservatives condemn that approach as an unnecessary and manipulative tactic to sway young people’s views of homosexuality.
It’s a highly emotional topic. Witness the hate mail – from the left and right – directed at Minnesota’s Anoka-Hennepin School District while it reviews its anti-bullying strategies in the aftermath of a gay student’s suicide…
What leaps out at you first here is the rote equivocation on the part of this mainstream reporter. Instead of stating what is simply a fact here that religious conservatives insist young people’s views of homosexuals must remain negative, its religious conservatives condemn that approach as an unnecessary and manipulative tactic to sway young people’s views of homosexuality. Never mind that. Note that its hate mail when it comes both from the homophobes and people outraged at what homophobes are doing to helpless children.
Reporters can’t be taking sides after all. Just imagine the national outrage and loathing if the news media was as carefully neutral toward Al Qaeda. We can’t call them terrorists after all, that would be taking sides…
This in a nutshell, is why gay kids are dying. The religious right has successfully convinced everyone that brutalizing gays is an essential part of their religious freedom. Hating Jews might raise a few eyebrows. Hating people of color might get them some frowns of disapproval. But to even question that they are and have been for decades now engaged in a systematic campaign of hate mongering, let alone question their need to hate their gay neighbor is apparently a step too far. And the consequence is that gay kids feel as though they have no friends in the adult world. Their need for love and acceptance in this world is of no more importance then the need of bigots to spit in their faces and look the other way while their kids kick them in the stomach. They are alone.
But if we act aggressively to protect gay kids from bullying we’re taking sides and that just wouldn’t be fair…
But at least four younger teens have killed themselves since July after being targeted by anti-gay bullying, including Justin Aaberg, 15, of Andover, Minn., who hanged himself in his room in July. His friends told his mother he’d been a frequent target of bullies mocking his sexual orientation.Five other students in his Anoka-Hennepin school district have killed themselves in the past year, and gay-rights advocates say bullying may have played a role in two of these cases as well.
Carlson, the district superintendent, lost a teenage daughter of his own in a car crash, and says he shares the anguish of the parents bereaved by suicide. He acknowledges that a controversial district policy calling for “neutrality” in classroom discussions of sexual orientation may have created an impression among some teachers, students and outsiders that school staff wouldn’t intervene aggressively to combat anti-gay bullying.
As we software engineers say, it’s not a bug, it’s a feature…
Evan Hurst says he’s listening to Queensrÿche tonight because he’s a category-defiant gay. When my first grade teacher called me defiant I should have insisted she prepend that term with “Category”… Oh no Miss Kiefer…I am Category Defiant… A good way to make her hate me even more was to let her know I knew more words then the other kids…
A Random 10
(Open iTunes or your iPod app, go to your songs list, select Shuffle and list the first ten songs that pop up…)
“Career March” – The Apartment, Adolph Deutsch
“Sound of Thunder” – Duran Duran
“Reflections of Earth – Epcot: Tapestry of Dreams, Gavin Greenaway
“Hit The Ground Runnin'” – Lie To Me, Jonny Lang
“Goliath” – David and Bathsheba, Alfred Newman
“$100 Understanding” – Happy Ending, Michel Legrand
“Jeux d’ enfants” – Bizet
The Rite of Spring, Part II, The Exalted Sacrifice – Igor Stravinsky
“Freedom” – The Best of Jimi Hendrix
“Cutting Edge” – The Brave Little Toaster, David Newman
No kidding…one minute its Enter Sandman and the next its Wichita Lineman…
This month’s column is a tale of two rats. One rat got lots of attention from its mother when it was young; she licked its fur many times a day. The other rat had a different experience. Its mother hardly licked its fur at all. The two rats grew up and turned out to be very different. The neglected rat was easily startled by noises. It was reluctant to explore new places. When it experienced stress, it churned out lots of hormones. Meanwhile, the rat that had gotten more attention from its mother was not so easily startled, was more curious, and did not suffer surges of stress hormones.
The same basic tale has repeated itself hundreds of times in a number of labs. The experiences rats had when they were young altered their behavior as adults. We all intuit that this holds true for people, too, if you replace fur-licking with school, television, family troubles, and all the other experiences that children have. But there’s a major puzzle lurking underneath this seemingly obvious fact of life. Our brains develop according to a recipe encoded in our genes. Each of our brain cells contains the same set of genes we were born with and uses those genes to build proteins and other molecules throughout its life. The sequence of DNA in those genes is pretty much fixed. For experiences to produce long-term changes in how we behave, they must be somehow able to reach into our brains and alter how those genes work.
Neuroscientists are now mapping that mechanism…
This is interesting on a number of accounts. Firstly, as a gay man, it concerns me how the question of nature verses nurture is dealt with, as it has been a trip point in the culture war for decades now. And as it seems to be turning out more and more, it’s a combination of both. The story here is that genes may say one thing, but the effects of the environment, the physical environment, you grow up in, can overrule them all the same…
Two families of molecules perform that kind of genetic regulation. One family consists of methyl groups, molecular caps made of carbon and hydrogen. A string of methyl groups attached to a gene can prevent a cell from reading its DNA sequence. As a result, the cell can’t produce proteins or other molecules from that particular gene. The other family is made up of coiling proteins, molecules that wrap DNA into spools. By tightening the spools, these proteins can hide certain genes; by relaxing the spools, they can allow genes to become active.
How this plays out in terms of one’s sexual orientation fascinated me less then this…
…the influence of environment doesn’t end with childhood. Recent work indicates that adult experiences can also rearrange epigenetic marks in the brain and thereby change our behavior. Depression, for example, may be in many ways an epigenetic disease. Several groups of scientists have mimicked human depression in mice by pitting the animals against each other. If a mouse loses a series of fights against dominant rivals, its personality shifts. It shies away from contact with other mice and moves around less. When the mice are given access to a machine that lets them administer cocaine to themselves, the defeated mice take more of it.
Something, probably my body’s low tolerance to intoxicants, has kept me thankfully clear of addiction. But I know its temptations. There are days when I think if I could only drug myself out my my misery, life would be so much better. But my body simply won’t let me do that. I have no escape. Well…I have one. But it’s one I’ve not reached for. So far.
I have the job of my dreams. A house of my own I never in my wildest dreams ever thought I’d have. My dream come true car. And I am miserable. Single, lonely and miserable. If you don’t have love, nothing else matters. You can be rich. You can be living in the lap of luxury, and if you have no one, you have nothing and you know it. You will always know it. And at some level I have always known my brain was stacked against me in that struggle.
I was brutalized in grade school. It was only by shear luck that I lived in a tiny neighborhood that was diverted to this little expansion high school in a well to do neighborhood and away from my tormentors that allowed me to have at least a good final three years of grade school. Woodward was paradise compared to my Jr. High School years and my elementary school years were only slightly less brutal. When I wasn’t getting beaten up by the other kids, I was getting emotionally battered by the teachers, nearly all of whom dumped me in the problem child category, simply because mom was a single divorced mother. The few in those days who actually took an interest in me and gave me a chance to learn have always had my eternal gratitude.
Woodward, I have said time and again, was paradise…absolutely the best years of my school life. But even paradise could not undo the damage. It wasn’t until my senior year that I finally started peeking out of the shell my tormentors had locked me into. And by then it was, really, too late to start figuring out that dating and mating thing. And besides, I was a gay kid, and it was 1971.
And I’m 57 now, and still single, and if anything surprises me it’s that I’m still alive. I really shouldn’t be. I honestly don’t know why I am still alive. It’s your own fault Bruce. We had to do it to you. You were so weird we had to. It’s your own fault Bruce. You need to get out more. Friends don’t help friends find a lover, they rub it in that it’s their own fault. People who look like that, want people who look like that. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Why am I still here?
It was posted at Suicide.org, and it’s from a gay teen, aged 16, named Steven, who attempted suicide. He survived.
It’s brutal, and I would rather no gay kid reads it. Seriously, if you’re a gay teen go look at some of the videos over at Dan Savage’s It Gets Better Project. Because it Does get better. You don’t need to be dealing with what I’m about to post here. You have resources. The Trevor Hotline is a 24-hour toll-free suicide prevention line for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, and questioning youth. Call them at 1-866-4-U-Trevor (866-488-7386). But seriously…go see It Gets Better. And…I love you. Hang in there. There are adventures waiting for you live them. There are people waiting in your future for you to come into their lives and make them smile and feel like they will always be loved and never be lonely again. Your dreams are waiting for you. Walk proudly into them.
After decades of demonizing gay people and blasting devotion of same-sex couples as fraudulent, Maggie Gallagher suddenly surprises everyone by announcing she thinks she has a heart…
“The suicide of that teen was not only a tragedy it was a crime. The young people who violated laws out of mindless desire to bully or embarrass or whatever the heck kids do this stuff will be prosecuted and probably jailed, I hope. Nothing in the press accounts suggest the kids who did this were motivated by homophobia, and the cruelty of cyberbullying is causing teen suicides among those who are not gay, as well. I do not think the absence of gay marriage is the cause of these tragedies or its presence will resolve them. We can make this a symbol of all our other fights, or we can try to save all our kids, gay and straight, from this kind of ugly and mindless cruelty. My heart goes out to the family of the young man. God bless him and them.” – Maggie Gallagher, commenting on NOM’s blog.
“A group of San Francisco first-graders took an unusual field trip to City Hall on Friday to toss rose petals on their just-married lesbian teacher – putting the public school children at the center of a fierce election battle over the fate of same-sex marriage,” the front page story by Jill Tucker begins.
In fact, the parents who decided to surprise the beloved schoolteacher didn’t put the children “at the center of a fierce election battle” – the Chronicle did for sensationalism.
According to blogger Paul Hogarth in his Oct. 24 dissection of the piece for Beyond Chron and Daily Kos (“SF Chronicle Jeopardizes Marriage Equality”), Tucker said that “the parents who organized the trip actively sought media coverage—and the paper decided on its own that it was ‘news’ enough to deserve front-page treatment.”
Since lesbian weddings were legal then, one can image that the parents might have expected any coverage to go in the back with the other wedding announcements. On Oct. 26 two aggrieved parents sent a letter to the Yes on 8 campaign and the Chronicle complaining about their children “being exploited and used as pawns” by the Yes campaign which downloaded the front page picture from the Chronicle’s website to use in their ads.
Sapphocrat, who blogs at LavenderLiberal, complained vociferously about the Chronicle’s failure to put the field trip into the larger context of the Creative Arts Charter School’s philosophy.
But the damage was done. In an in-depth interview with me after Prop 8 passed, campaign consultant Steve Smith said they were winning back the critical undecided women’s vote until the Yes ad featuring the Chronicle story on the lesbian teacher.
That post by Karen Ocamb centers on the roll of the San Francisco Chronicle in instigating the successful Yes On 8 attack ads which used that teacher’s wedding as a hook for their The Homos Are Invading Your Schools To Turn Your Kids Gay message. But lurking in the background of her story is this simple, brutal fact: Maggie Gallagher and her fellow travelers in the Proposition 8 battle used the love those kids had for their teacher as a knife to cut their teacher’s ring finger off.
But she wants to save kids from mindless cruelty. Right. And Osama Bin Laden wants to save them from terrorist attacks.
More cartoons on The Cartoon Page…and many more in the archives I’ve been neglecting to update for so long…
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